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Kathryn Bigelow: Oscar's reluctant leading lady

There's no doubt she is a woman, and an undeniably attractive one at that; an imposing six-footer with model looks that make the calendar seem like a damned liar – can she really be 58?

Bigelow is, in fact, one heck of a director. One who is, if pundits and polls are to be believed, about to make history Sunday by becoming the first woman in Oscar's 82-year reign to win Best Director at the Academy Awards.

It could be a one-two punch. Her film The Hurt Locker, a bomb-squad drama that has become the ultimate Little Film That Could, seems poised to become the first movie directed by a woman to win Best Picture. If Bigelow pulls these wins off, she'll have the added satisfaction of having beaten ex-husband James Cameron, who is nominated in the same categories for his sci-fi extravaganza Avatar. Ka-zing!

She's already amassed many awards, including her recent win as the first woman to take the annual Directors Guild of America prize for Outstanding Directorial Achievement.

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There's just one problem with all this you-go-girl chest thumping: Bigelow is having none of it. She professes not to care about her XX chromosomes in a directorial gene pool that is lousy with XY ones. She has no desire to be the poster girl for female empowerment, even though – and perhaps because – she came of age in the 1970s, when shouting such achievements from the rooftops was de rigueur.

"I just don't look at filmmaking through a gender lens," Bigelow tells the Star. "I wish there were more women (who direct films). But to me, it's like talking about `a woman mathematician' or `a woman astrophysicist.' We don't refer to them that way. And we don't say, `Oh, I'm going to be interviewed by a male journalist today.'

"So why do we do that with directors? I think if somehow there could be a moratorium on these distinctions, it would be great."

She concludes the thought with a girlish laugh, one that comes easily to her, but it doesn't mask the firmness of her message. Bigelow has fought gender distinctions and expectations throughout her 32-year filmmaking career, which began with the 1978 short The Set-Up, in which two men fight while semioticians deconstruct the violence.

Whether she admits it or not, Bigelow's films – now up to eight features and counting – have been defined by gender in ways both subtle and not. Perhaps to prove that she is not just one of the gals, she is drawn to making movies filled with action and violence in genres that are typically viewed as male pursuits: witness the vampire sexiness of Near Dark (1987), the surfer sleuthing of Point Break (1991), the sci-fi thrills of Strange Days (1995) and the down-deep drama of K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).

When she chooses to go with a female protagonist, they are always as tough as steel: as in Blue Steel (1989), in which Jamie Lee Curtis plays a cop who goes mano-a-mano with a serial killer; and in The Weight of Water, in which Toronto's Sarah Polley gives visceral meaning to the "hell hath no fury" adage about female anger.

Then, of course, there's The Hurt Locker, a movie so pumped full of testosterone it could risk being banned by Olympic doping watchdogs. Oscar-nominated Jeremy Renner stars as William James, who leads a squad of U.S. Army bomb disposal experts whose vein-popping job it is to spot and defuse IEDs – improvised explosive devices – hidden on Iraqi streets.

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Bigelow seems to understand the male mind better than most men do, but typically, she sees no grand scheme in this. "I think it's probably an unconscious thing," she says. "I really look for peak experiences and dramatic material that can allow peak experiences. I think film has an opportunity to be so experiential, and to really transport you, unlike any other medium. So I'm drawn to material that can provide that. There's nothing more dramatic than the backdrop of combat, and within the combat arena there's a male quotient that's undeniable. So that comes with the territory.

"So I guess what I'm saying is that my access (to male thinking) comes from that boots-on-the-ground experience. I had an interest in putting you on the ground, putting you there."

Her comment about film being unlike any other medium is no small distinction. Had fate and personal interest taken a different path, Bigelow might today be known as a painter or horse breeder. She grew up in the San Francisco bedroom community of San Carlos with a fascination for art and horses, not film.

But a small acting role in the 1983 cult feminist film Born in Flames (she played a newspaper editor), followed by a master's degree in Columbia University's film division, helped her connect the dots between her highly visual ideas and the medium she ultimately felt best conveyed them.

Her keen visual sense accounts for two of the most striking things about The Hurt Locker, a film she made from a script written by her producer (and current boyfriend) Mark Boal, who spent time with bomb squads in Iraq as an embedded journalist.

Bigelow has directed many top actors but she didn't want The Hurt Locker to be loaded with famous faces that would have the audience guessing whether they lived or not.

She defiantly chose Renner, a character actor best known for playing monsters, such as serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Her faith paid off: Renner's nomination for Best Actor is among the nine Oscar nods The Hurt Locker is up for, tied for the lead with Avatar.

"The opportunity to have somebody totally fresh guide you through the terrain is lethal enough," Bigelow says, sweeping her long auburn hair from her face with her hand. "The enemy is seen and unseen, invisible for the most part. The opportunity to have somebody whom you're not bringing any preconceptions to, offered a real originality to him."

The terrain was deliberately chosen, too. Bigelow wanted to shoot in the streets of Baghdad, where the film's action takes place, but insurers took a hairy conniption over that idea. She compromised by shooting in Jordan.

"Some of our locations were five kilometres from the Iraqi border, so you're right there," she says, smiling. "There are over a million Iraqi refugees from the war in Jordan. And a large pool of them are actually actors, stranded in Jordan. A huge pool of them, and we were able to draw on that. It was a great place to shoot."

It was far from easy, though. The physical heat was intense and enervating, and actors had to wear 85-pound bomb disposal suits for long stretches. There was also the financial heat: Bigelow was shooting outside the traditional studio system, as she always has, and she had to convince her money people that a no-star film set during the Iraq War would be a commercial prospect.

"She fought for us," said Renner in a separate interview. "It was difficult having three up-and-coming actors (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty were the others) and an Iraq War film. It's amazing this thing got made."

Renner was knocked out by Bigelow's devotion to detail. "What I'm so happy about, because it was so arduous for us shooting this thing, everywhere across the board, is that she captured it. There's no faking in what we went through.

"It was as close to being in war without being in war. I know I'm just some actor pretending to be in it, but physically it was very difficult for the conditions we were in."

Sarah Polley also remembers Bigelow's total commitment from the shoot a decade ago for The Weight of Water, a film that, for a variety of reasons not necessarily related to the film, struggled to find distribution and an audience.

"She is someone who works very much on instinct," Polley said via email. "She reacts viscerally to what is in the moment and seizes it. She's very in tune with herself and her gut."

Bigelow is pleased by comments like these. She wants to be known and lauded not because she's a female director, but because she's a passionate one, completely dedicated to her art.

"I can't stand outside myself and be anybody else. I can't be a male trying to get a film made.

"My interest is to work in as uncompromised a way as possible. It's really just based on the material, and I'm interested in being as accurate and as authentic as possible. I kind of need to work `off the reservation' to achieve that."

She gets kudos from Polley, who is both an actress and a film director, for refusing to be accept limitations on who she is. But Polley is also pragmatic enough to know that a win for Bigelow this weekend could be good for all women, and she's cheered by that.

"I think the Oscars are symbolic," Polley said. "I don't think it means anything substantial that she wins the Oscar – but symbols do make a difference sometimes for people starting out. The more visibility there is for female filmmakers, the more women see themselves as belonging in the film industry. "

Bigelow will just have to be gracious about it all – she has been so far – and get a bigger mantel for all her trophies.

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